House rules
The rules we hold ourselves to
Somebody opens a recipe with 200 g of butter already softening on the counter. If a weight is wrong they lose the ingredients, the afternoon, and whatever they were baking it for. These are the rules that stop that happening. Updated 8 October 2026.
1. Every quantity comes from somewhere
No recipe on this site is written from memory. Before a single gram is published, three published recipes for the same thing are found and every one of their pages is opened. A program compares their proportions: against the flour for anything baked, and against the sugar for fudge and other sweets, which have no flour. The two that agree most closely are kept, because when two recipes developed separately land close together, the shape underneath them is real and worth building on. When even the closest two disagree by more than a third, which usually means three different recipes under one name, three more are found and all six compared, rather than averaging numbers that are arguing.
Those sources are printed on the recipe, under Where these quantities come from, with the weights we read and every place we departed from them. You can go and check. That is the entire point of printing them.
2. The numbers are not owned by anyone, the words are never copied
A list of ingredients and quantities is not something anybody can own, and we take those freely. The writing is a different matter, so no method text, note or photograph is ever copied from a source. The words are drafted for this site with the help of AI, from the checked numbers, and then read and edited.
3. Every kind of recipe has a house size, and scaling to it is checked by code
A cake here is one tall cake in a 20 cm springform. Cookies are a batch of about 24, the dough weighed into balls and baked a tray at a time. Brownies are one slab in a 20 cm square tin, and fudge and other sweets one slab in the same tin, cooked to a temperature on a sugar thermometer. Published recipes come in every size, so almost every one is scaled, and that is exactly where a recipe goes wrong: a cake batter scaled up by half needs more than half again the time, because heat has further to travel and the top browns long before the middle sets.
So the rules that can be checked are not a checklist any more. They are a program that runs before anything is published, and it refuses:
- more than the pan holds: cake batter over 1,350 g in a 20 cm springform, brownie batter over 1,300 g or fudge over 1,400 g in a 20 cm square tin, and cookie dough over 1,200 g for one batch
- a cake batter over 1,000 g given less than 45 minutes in the oven, because it would come out raw
- sugar and fat that drift more than a fifth from the proportions the sources agree on
- a fudge or toffee cooked to a temperature its sources do not use, or a method that never names the thermometer and the sugar stage
- cookies whose ball weight times their number is not the dough they came from
- more than 1.5 tsp of baking powder per 150 g of flour, which tastes of the tin it came from
- bicarbonate of soda with no acid anywhere to react with
- an oven temperature whose fan and Fahrenheit conversions do not agree with each other
- a method with no doneness test: the skewer, the set edges, the wobble or the cold-water test
- an ingredient in the list that the method never uses, or a weight in the method that no ingredient has
That last one matters more than it sounds. It is the check that stops a recipe saying 250 g in step three when the list says 195 g, which is the single most common error in published baking.
4. Long enough to tell when it is going wrong
Every step says what the thing should look, feel or smell like, not only what to do to it. "Cream the butter and sugar" is useless on its own. Four to five minutes, until it is pale and noticeably lighter in volume and holds a soft peak on the beater, is a sentence you can check yourself against.
That is why these recipes are long. It is not padding for a search engine. It is the difference between following instructions and knowing what you are looking at.
5. No invented anything
No grandmother who did not exist, no village in Austria the cake did not come from, no health claim, and no nutrition figure we did not calculate. If we do not know something, the recipe says so.
6. The pictures are of the actual steps
The step pictures are generated with an AI image model from one locked description of a single kitchen, so that the pictures read as one afternoon rather than several different bakes. Each one is checked against what has physically happened by that point in the method, and each picture is attached by name to the step it shows rather than handed out in order. A finished cake or a cut square of fudge never appears in a mixing shot, because at that moment in the method nothing has been baked or set yet.
7. Nothing goes up half-checked
Passing the checks means a recipe is internally consistent and agrees with its sources. It does not prove it is a good recipe, so the bar is strict: a recipe goes up only when every check passes with nothing left over and every picture has been checked against its step. Anything short of that is held back for a person to read. When a recipe is replaced, the replacement is written and checked before the old one comes down. If you bake one and it does not work, tell us: corrections are published on the page they affect.
Rules for your kitchen
These are the ones we cannot check for you.
Read the packet, not the recipe, for allergens
Every recipe flags nuts, dairy, egg, gluten and alcohol plainly in its notes. That flag is about the recipe, not about your particular brands. Chocolate is made on lines that also handle nuts, "vanilla essence" is sometimes alcohol, and only the packet in your hand knows. We cannot know your allergies and a recipe page is not a substitute for checking.
Ovens lie, and yours lies in its own particular way
Every temperature here is given three ways: conventional, fan, and Fahrenheit. They are still a starting point. An oven thermometer costs very little and will tell you more about your baking than any recipe can. Where a recipe gives a window, start checking at the early end.
Bake it through
Raw flour and raw egg both carry a real risk, so cakes go back in rather than getting eaten underdone. Anything on this site containing raw or barely cooked egg, such as a fresh curd or an uncooked buttercream, says so at the top of its notes. If you are pregnant, very young, elderly or immunocompromised, use pasteurised egg or skip those.
Hot sugar is the dangerous part
Caramel runs at about 170C and fudge at about 115C, far hotter than boiling water, and both stick to skin. Cream going into hot sugar erupts, so warm it first, stand back, and use a heavy pan that holds at least three times what goes into it. Children are better placed on the whisking than on the boiling sugar.
The scale is not optional
Everything here is in grams because cups are not a measurement of anything. A cup of flour spooned in weighs about 120 g and a cup scooped and packed can weigh 150 g, which is a quarter more flour than the recipe wants, and a quarter more flour is a dry cake. Digital scales cost less than the ingredients they save.
Rules about using what is here
Bake them, halve them, double them, sell what you bake. The full position is on the terms page, and the short version is that the numbers are yours to use and the writing and pictures are not yours to republish.
Rules about your data
We store an email address if you give us one, and nothing else. Saved recipes and ticked ingredients stay in your own browser and never reach us. The cookie notice remembers your answer in your browser's local storage, under creamyslice:consent, so that it stops asking. That is the only thing this site stores on your device, and declining is a real decline. The detail is on the privacy page.
If something is wrong
If a weight looks wrong to you, it might be, and we would rather know. Emailhello@candykitchen.net with the recipe and the step, and it gets checked against the sources the same day.
If you have found a security problem, there is a contact and a scope at/.well-known/security.txt. Please tell us before you tell anyone else.